AN EVENING WITH GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON

The Santa Fe International Folk Art Market presents:


AN EVENING WITH GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON, journalist and New York Times Best-Selling Author of The Dressmaker of Khair Khana

7 pm Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 West San Francisco Street (admission fee)
Tickets: Lensic Box Office or call the Lensic Box Office at 505-988-1234

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s riveting book, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, follows the true story of Kamila Sidiqui, an extraordinarily determined young female entrepreneur living under the restrictive and punishing rule of the Taliban in Kabul after the civil war. By picking up a needle and thread and establishing a clandestine sewing business, Kamila, other female members of her family and neighbors managed to earn income to feed themselves and survive under impossible conditions for women. From reporting Kamila’s inspirational story, Ms. Lemmon has become a major voice to encourage financial institutions and governments to support female entrepreneurship in order to rebuild society in conflict and post-conflict regions around the world. She is Contributing Editor At Large for Newsweek Magazine and the Daily Beast, and the deputy director of the Council on Foreign Relation’s Women and Foreign Policy program. She will be joined by Market participant and entrepreneur Rangina Hamidi and Gene Grant, host of PBS New Mexico in Focus.

A limited number of $125 tickets provides prime seating for the event at the Lensic, and includes a pre-event party reception with the author at the Coyote Cantina (5:30 – 6:30 pm). Party goers will enjoy cocktails, appetizers, and will also receive a signed copy of the hardcover edition of Lemmon’s inspiring bestseller, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana. (This is a fundraiser to support the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market.)

Other tickets are priced at $35 for preferred seating, $25 general seating, and $15 balcony seating.


Full schedule of 2012 Santa Fe International Fold Art Market here.

Related: The Santa Fe International Folk Art Market is a treasure for its global reach and domestic drawing power, a model for artists and artisans around the world:

Kandahar Treasures, is giving financial freedom to women who do the traditional geometric embroidery unique to the area. Started by Rangina Hamidi, an Afghan whose family fled war to the United States when she was a child, the project now has more than 400 women selling products. Some of the women earn up to $100 a month, which is almost double the average government salary. Homes with mothers and daughters participating have dramatically improved their family’s economic standing, and given women more control over their lives.


The Santa Fe International Folk Art Market is a results-oriented entrepreneurial 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that provides a venue for master traditional artists to display, demonstrate and sell their work. By providing opportunities for folk artists to succeed in the global marketplace, the Market creates economic empowerment and improves the quality of life in communities where folk artists live.

It is now the largest international folk art market in the world, and its success led to Santa Fe’s designation as a UNESCO City of Folk Art, the first U.S. city named to UNESCO’s prestigious Creative Cities Network.

Tony O'Brian: "Contemplative Landscapes,” opens at the New Mexico History Museum Oct. 23

A Quiet Moment, Monastery of Christ in the Desert, 1995/2009. Photo by Tony O'Brien

The Albuquerque Journal

A time to refocus

By Kathaleen Roberts / Journal Staff Writer

The photographs reveal the sacred slant of light slicing across bowed heads, a solitary figure trudging up a snowy hill toward the chapel, loaves of freshly baked bread cooling on a wooden tabletop.

Tony O’Brien photographed Christ in the Desert Monastery for one year and discovered his own personal solace. The photographer’s dramatic black and white series forms the heart of “Contemplative Landscapes,” opening at the New Mexico History Museum Oct. 23.

Imprisoned by the Afghan secret police for six weeks while on assignment for Life magazine in 1989, O’Brien sought refuge and perspective at the Benedictine monastery. He returned to do a story in 1994 and in the process became a member of the community. His year-long spiritual sojourn granted him rare access to daily life in a community living a tradition dating to the Middle Ages. The monastery’s seclusion encouraged focus on St. Benedict’s guiding tenets –– hospitality, humility, acceptance and perseverance. He excavated the canyon deep within himself.

"I probably didn’t realize at the time that it was an opportunity for me to put a little closure to some things in my life that came out of prison and to understand who I was,” said O’Brien, now teaching photography at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

The photojournalist had worked for both the Albuquerque Journal and the New Mexican and covered the Gulf War, as well as the violence in Northern Ireland, Central America, Pakistan, India and finally Afghanistan. He had visited the monastery and befriended some of the monks.

Before his capture, he had been working in Peshawar covering the war between the Soviets and the Afghan Mujahideen. There was a bounty on western journalists, especially Americans. O’Brien traveled to Kabul to meet with a network of guerrillas in a safe house.

“The commander in charge of my little group sold me out,” he said.

At first he was put in relatively solitary confinement with two Afghans.

“We never saw anyone,” he said. “I came back one day after interrogation and one of my cell mates was gone. You never knew what happened.”

Roughed up, but not beaten, he said most of the abuse he endured was psychological.

“You got shoved around a bit, but once I was in prison, it was the interrogation, never having the lights off, waking you up in the middle of the night.”

“Sometimes I’d be in interrogation for 12 hours,” he continued. “I didn’t exist in the world anymore because nobody knew where I was.”

He began re-examining his life. Hope arrived in the form of his cellmate Nadr Ali, a practicing Shiite Muslim. O’Brien watched Nadr Ali say his prayers five times a day and soon joined him in his own prayers, following the Muslim cycle. The pair even crafted their own prayer beads.

In captivity, O’Brien collided with his own vulnerability.

“When I was captured, one of my first thoughts was ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to see my mother again’,” O’Brien said. “That was shattering.” It was through Nadr Ali’s faith and trust in God that he endured.

“He was just an ordinary guy and he turned out to be one of the strongest individuals I’ve ever met. That doesn’t mean I didn’t sink into the abyss,” O’Brien said. “I give a lot of credit to Nadr and his faith. This was a Muslim –– the bad guys.”

Raised Catholic, but no longer practicing the faith of his childhood, O’Brien had long been fascinated by the Benedictines and monasticism. The similarities between monastic life and prison were not lost on him.

“I always thought it was funny,” he said. “I had a cell in Afghanistan and I had a cell at the monastery.
“It was the quiet and the solitude that drew me,” he continued. “At the same time, there was that sense of community. These monks are on their own individual journeys, but they do it in community.”

At first, O’Brien stayed in the guest house. But he quickly realized the separate quarters would always render him an outsider. The monks agreed to allow him to join them in his own cell. He rose with vigils at 4 a.m., chanted the psalms, celebrated the triumph of life over death, light over darkness in a life defined by prayer. He waited nearly a month and a half before he began taking pictures.

“By the time the project ended, even though I was the photographer, I wasn’t the photographer,” he said. “If I lifted my camera, nobody paid any attention. It was almost like having another family. I feel very blessed for that.”

The project changed the way the deadline-driven photographer worked.

“I came out of the newspaper/magazine business,” he said. “(I learned) it’s OK, slow down. If you miss it, something else will come along. Keep it simple. Watch it evolve. Another gift I got was I learned it was OK to say I don’t know.”

But perhaps most profoundly, the tiny monastery tucked between the canyon walls along the Chama River changed him spiritually.

“It allowed me to become more at peace with who I was and with my beliefs,” he explained. “Part of it all is the struggle and the questions. It’s how you live on your quest for God. Each individual is on their own journey, but you’re in a community and that’s how you get your strength to carry on.”

If you go

WHAT: “Contemplative Landscape”
WHEN: 2-4 p.m. opening reception Sunday, Oct. 23. Through April 7.
WHERE: New Mexico History Museum, 113 Lincoln Ave.
COST: $9 out-of-state; $6 New Mexico residents. Free Sunday to state residents; free Wednesday to New Mexico seniors. Free to museum members and children under 17. Free Fridays 5-8 p.m.
HOURS: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Sunday; open til 8 p.m. Friday.
CONTACT: 476-5200

War Photography: Bomb Took 3 Limbs, but Not Photographer’s Can-Do Spirit

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

"I have never seen myself as seriously wounded," says Giles Duley.

 
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: July 8, 2011
LONDON


TO the annals of understatement and optimism add this: the account of Giles Duley, an independent photographer, about the moment after he stepped on a hidden bomb while covering an American and Afghan infantry patrol.

Mr. Duley heard a click and felt a flash of heat as the explosion lifted him into the air. He landed on his side on the dirt, roughly five yards from where he had stood. He smelled the stink of the explosives mixed with that of his own burned flesh. He took stock.

“I remember looking up and seeing bits of me and my clothes in the tree, which I knew wasn’t a good sign,” he said. “I saw my left arm. It was just obviously shredded to pieces, and smoldering. I couldn’t feel my legs, so straightaway and from what I could see in the tree, I figured they were gone.”

Mr. Duley had become, in that flash, a triple amputee. Now he risked swiftly bleeding to death. He recalled uttering a single word: “bollocks.”

As the American soldiers he had been walking with rushed toward him and began tightening the tourniquets that would save his life, a fuller line of thought took flight. Rather than tally what was missing, Mr. Duley counted what remained.

“I thought, ‘Right hand? Eyes?’ ” — he realized that all of these were intact — “and I thought, ‘I can work.’ ”

Mr. Duley, 39, was wounded in February in Kandahar Province, becoming another in the long line of casualties in the Pentagon’s offensive to displace the Taliban from one of its rural strongholds.

Five months on, after leaving the hospital, he is roughly midway through a 12-week physiotherapy regimen at Headley Court, a military rehabilitation center near London.

There, freshly fitted with two prosthetic legs and a left arm, he has been relearning to walk and confronting the details of pushing forward in life. Pulled along by what would seem an incurably upbeat mind, he is making plans to return to work as a photographer.

WHEN he set out for Afghanistan, Mr. Duley, a former fashion and celebrity photographer who changed his focus to cover what he considered untold stories of human suffering and resilience, had been preparing to start a quarterly photography journal, to be called Document.

In an interview at his sister’s home in London during a weekend furlough, he said the project had not been derailed by his wounds. He said he hoped to publish the inaugural issue next year. But before doing so, he said, he wants to return to the field.

His first planned trip? Back to Kandahar, to photograph the medical treatment of Afghan civilians.

The technicians who fashion the prosthetic limbs at Headley Court are crafting a stubby prosthetic arm that will be fitted with a tripod head. To this, Mr. Duley said, he will attach a camera that he will raise to his eye, and then get back to work.

“You see?” he said, demonstrating how he can move the remaining portion of his left arm. He swung the stump quickly to his face. Then, with his right hand, he depressed an imaginary shutter button on an imaginary camera hovering where his arm came to its abruptly severed end. “The length is just about perfect,” he said.

Mr. Duley’s misfortune has made his own life resemble those of the profile subjects he once sought. But he has framed his lot not as a tragedy — “I have never seen myself as seriously wounded,” he said — but as a life-altering hardship that contains opportunity, too.

As a triple amputee, he said, he hopes to channel interest in his own struggles into bringing more attention to the suffering of other people. “For me to make sense of what happened to me, I have to make it advantageous to the work I do,” he said.

If this cheerful blend of pragmatism and editorial sense could seem to suggest that his journey has been easy, do not be deceived. Mr. Duley has traveled a terrifying path.

Soon after he was wounded, complications set in. Laboring on a respirator, he nearly died from a lung condition and soaring body temperatures in his first weeks in England. On Feb. 26 his family was called at night to his bedside, told that he might not last until dawn.


He survived. Even in the vigil, he said, he never accepted the possibility of death. “I would think, ‘breathe, breathe, breathe,’ ” he said.

If ever there was a thought that distilled a will to live, it was this.

By mid-March he was awake again. A new test began — trying to learn how to sit up and how to move, much less walk. With only one limb, and weakened by illness and from weeks of being almost motionless, he could not even drag himself along the floor.

ONCE the picture of self-sufficiency, he discovered that until he restored his physical fitness and learned to use prosthetic limbs, he would remain, in a word, a dependent. These indelible facts were made miserably clear in late April when, while trying to wash, he toppled from a shower stool.

There on the tiles, bleeding from a stump and unable to right himself or move anywhere, he was carried away by three nurses. He was naked. And crying. “That was the absolute bottom,” he said.

Since then he has been in almost continuous sessions of exercise and therapy, pushing himself upright and making himself start to walk, while accepting, he said, “that no matter how good I get, I will always keep falling.”

Other problems remain. He expects to undergo three more operations this year — a colostomy reversal, the removal of a bone spur at the end of his shattered right femur, the excision of balled nervous tissue in his left arm. He anticipates further surgeries in the years beyond.

All the while, he suffers from a particular affliction of the amputee: phantom pains, the excruciating alarm calls from limbs that no longer exist.

“Right now what I feel is a crushing sensation there,” he said, looking toward where his right foot would be. He added: “And there is on fire,” glancing to where he once had a left hand.

He said he had been told that these pains may never go away.

His balm is not painkillers, which he said he ceased taking a few weeks ago. It will be, he said, to restore his mobility and carry on.

For now, that means rounds of exercise alongside soldiers whose limbs were lost in the same ways. Gaining access to their regimen at the rehab center was difficult. Some in the government bureaucracy tried to block Mr. Duley’s admission.

Many objections were raised, including that as a civilian nearing 40, Mr. Duley was not in the same physical condition and mind-set as the young military men he would be working beside.

Three limbs gone, spirit whole, the photographer smiled as he recalled the exchange. “Don’t worry,” he said he jokingly assured the medical official who advanced that argument. “The soldiers will learn to keep up.”

The Giles Duley Fund
 
Related:  The war photographer’s biggest story: themselves
 
 Purple Hearts by Nina Berman opens at Royal Society of Medicine, London. Until 31st July



      

BEARING WITNESS

Wounded by a land mine, Joao Silva, a New York Times photographer, shot three frames before becoming too weak to hold the camera.


The New York Times
 
By Michael Kamber

Published: December 23, 2010

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, Joao Silva was a troubled high school dropout on the streets of Johannesburg. His future looked bleak until the day a friend took him along on a photo shoot. Joao fell in love with the camera.


He was drawn to battle. Within a remarkably short time, his photos of conflict were on the front pages of newspapers around the world. His camera became a prolific instrument, helping the public understand the wars of the last two decades.

His photographs from Iraq — where he was embedded with both the American troops and the insurgents fighting against them — created, in my opinion, an unequaled record of the war: a Marine pulling a bloody comrade through the mud to safety; an Iraqi mother wailing in anguish as her dead son lay nearby; an enraged militia member firing a machine gun from a window ledge at American soldiers; a car bomb victim engulfed in flames.

The danger was extraordinary. As his colleagues were killed and wounded over the years, Joao became the last working member of the fabled Bang-Bang Club to cover conflict. A tight-knit group of South African photographers who covered the township wars near the end of apartheid, they soon branched out into photographing other conflicts. Yet even with two young children, Joao persevered, making trip after trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones.

“I’ve always somehow managed to walk away unscathed,” Joao said. “I’ve been very, very lucky.”

Joao’s luck held until Oct. 23, when he stepped on a cheap plastic land mine outside Kandahar, Afghanistan. The blast ripped his legs off. Shrapnel tore through his abdomen, causing massive internal injuries. He is currently undergoing rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where he will remain for the foreseeable future.

Talented, humble and generous, Joao was the rock for many photojournalists in the field. It would be no exaggeration to call him probably the best-loved and most respected photographer working today. So his wounding has created a crisis of confidence of sorts for many photojournalists.

Like Joao, I am a contract photographer for The New York Times and have covered conflict over the years. I have taken his place in Afghanistan. In the wake of Joao’s wounding, friends ask me why I keep returning to photograph men inflicting suffering upon one another. I have asked myself and my fellow photojournalists this same question over the years.

I grew up in the 1960s, learning of Vietnam by poring over black-and-white photos in Life magazine and The Portland Press Herald. The classic images of Eddie Adams, Nick Ut and Henri Huet brought home to me the politics and drama of the war, a sense of my country’s history unfolding on the page. Photojournalists gave us a visceral understanding of the link between foreign policy and the violence done to people’s lives.

And photojournalism helped create a culture of visual literacy that was instrumental in the activism of the 1960s. It is a culture that is slowly receding into a storm of visual, aural and written white noise: the weekly wait for Life is replaced by a stream of cellphone photos, blogs and Twitter feeds. And as papers close around America, front-line photojournalism is in decline.

Still, the frustrations of photojournalists today are outweighed by many rewards. We venture into remote corners of the world to watch incredible dramas. We are often the sole objective witnesses. We find that much history would happen in a vacuum, save for our cameras.

“I get a lot of messages from people saying that we show the world what they cannot go see firsthand,” Joao told me last year.

This is the reward and the magic of photojournalism.

I know that Joao Silva’s camera has not finished its work. Once Joao finds balance on his new legs, he will venture again to the corners of the world. He loves photography like few I have known. Photojournalism remains a profession that allows a dedicated, courageous high school dropout from Johannesburg to help record the history of our times.